Tag: Brexit

The 23rd of June, 2019 is likely to be a black letter day in the British calendar. Exactly three years ago, on this very day, the fateful In/Out referendum on the continued membership of the EU was conducted under the direction of the then prime minister, David Cameron. He thought he would sail through the EU referendum and then rule the country for four more years in peace. Little did he know that he had fallen victim to the treachery of the hard-core Brexiteer gang and within 24 hours he would no longer be the prime minister of the country and the country would descend into utter chaos and possible dismemberment.

Now, what is this Brexit (British exit) ideology and how can this ideology be compared to the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) doctrine? Superficially, it may look totally disparate, far-fetched and ludicrous. But when one digs deeply at the root causes or mind-sets of these two dogmas, one finds uncanny resemblance and convergences of ideological objectives.

Brexit bus with the egregious claim

So,
what is this Brexit ideology? In the British society, particularly among the
elites and upper echelons of the English society, there are unconscious or subconscious
desires to gain back the good old imperialism. They hanker after the days when
Britainnia ruled the waves, sun never set in the British Empire. They were
distraught at the loss of coveted colonies like India and adjoining countries;
Malaysia, Burma, most of Africa and so forth since the WWII (World War II). Surely,
they can regain all these colonies only if they can break away the shackles of
the EU and become great again!

Compare this mind set with the ISIS fundamentalists. In the golden age of Islam, Islamic art and culture, scientific and technical achievements as well as military power were so dominant that no other country could come close to it. They were the supreme rulers of the world! Although those glory days were many centuries back, it is irrelevant to them. Couldn’t they pull back those golden days now and become great again?

The uncanny similarities between these two groups are astounding. Both of them are hankering after golden days – in ISIS case about seven to ten centuries back and in Brexit case about three centuries back – and harbouring the delusion that things would be rosy again. They simply disregard the intervening centuries, changed world circumstances with entirely different geo-political, economic, scientific, industrial and military positions. They just dream of the past rainbow images and desperately hope that they will come true if they want them earnestly enough! They are just delusional.

For the Brexiteers to have the present predicament of towing the EU rules and regulations over and above the national regulations is very demeaning and hurtful. How could they submit themselves to the regulations enacted by ‘unelected politicians’ (which Brexiteers mendaciously claim to be so) of states which had been liberated by Britain in the second world war? Surely Britain should have the most dominant role in the EU; not the state who had been beaten fairly and squarely in the last world war. For them, the present world order is too bitter a pill to swallow.

ISIS Jihadists

The
ISIS is in the same dilemma. They claim to have given the world scientific
disciplines like Algebra, Geometry, Astronomy, Optics, Medicine etc and now
Muslims are told to follow the advancement in these disciplines carried out by
the infidels! Quran is the book given only to Muslims directly by God (Allah)
and that holy book contains all the knowledge there is in the world! The ISIS now,
proclaiming the Caliphate of the Muslim world, is the rightful owner of all the
superior knowledge given by God to human beings. And why should ISIS with
glorious background follow the laws and regulations enacted by the infidels?
They should follow Sharia Laws and become great again!

All of this parallelism between Brexit and ISIS would have been ignored or gone unnoticed, but for the ‘populist’ politicians and ‘fundamentalist’ Mullahs stoking up their respective sectarian narratives. These two strands of people are not confined to the UK only, they are everywhere; it is a world-wide phenomenon.

Populism from Trump in America, Johnson in Britain, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey and many more round the world are creating a poisonous political atmosphere and vitiating democratic processes to suit their own purposes. The claims such as £350 million per week extra to the cash-starved NHS (from the saving of British subscription to the EU), stopping of millions of Turks (to the tune of 80 million!) coming to the UK under the EU, unacceptability of Brussels rule (by unelected representatives) over the British parliament, loss of millions of jobs due to European immigrants coming to Britain etc. were the ‘ignominious populist’ British propaganda underpinning the Brexit ideology. Once these blatantly false and egregious dogma were thrown out in to the public domain, they are very difficult to put back and Brexit has become a firmly held ‘religious dogma’. A recent survey of opinion poll had shown that among the Tory party members, Brexit has become such a sacrosanct issue that over 64% of them are prepared to sacrifice the Union of this country, accept significant decline in national economy, accept drastic drop in standards of living of the public in order to achieve Brexit! What Brexit will achieve is not important to them; but Brexit must be upheld. This view is no less fundamentalist in severity than the religious fundamentalism.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaiming ISIS a few years ago had the ultimate objective of establishing a pure form of Islam upholding the fundamentalist ideology. This ideology, called Wahhabism, emanating from the Sunni sect is the only version of Islam worth keeping and all other sects of Islam as well as all other religions may be sacrificed. The internecine conflict between Sunni and Shia arises from this basic premise. The fundamentalist Wahhabi ideology has become supreme and everything else is dispensable.

Anti-Brexit march in London in 2019

Doesn’t it ring a bell of uncanny similarities between the Brexiteers and ISIS Jihadists? Both are myopic pursuant of their own tunnel visions disregarding surroundings and all other factors. This mind set arises from extreme form mental disease due to egoistic, xenophobic, supremacist attitudes. These two attitudes are the two sides of the same worn-out coin.

A
new dawn in British politics may have begun on Thursday, the 2nd of
May 2019. It arises not only because the Lib Dems have literally risen from the
ashes of coalition with the Tories between 2010 and 2015, but also because the
Greens have managed to find space to push through green shoots in the perched
landscape devastated by the right-wing elements of the Tories.

The right-wing clique of the Tory party had been agitating for quite sometime to get Britain out of the EU. Their underlying aim was to take Britain out of the EU (and thereby out of the EU regulations) and make Britain into an offshore tax haven to materialise their selfish ends. Realising Tory party’s visceral antipathy towards the EU and to bring together the divided Tory party, David Cameron, the then prime minister, in his ‘Bloomberg Speech in 2013’ agreed to have a In/Out referendum on EU by 2017, if the Tory Party wins the 2015 election. Probably he felt as the prime minister of the coalition government with Lib Dems that there would be little chance of Tory party winning outright in 2015 general election and therefore committing EU referendum was a low risk strategy.

However,
the political landscape changed dramatically since 2015. In the general
election, Tory party did manage to win an overall majority of 5 seats by most
disingenuous and unscrupulous means by blaming the coalition partner, the Lib
Dems, of all shortcomings and failures of the government. The drubbing that the
Lib Dems had suffered for being the partner of the Tories was that 57 Lib Dems MPs
had been reduced to mere 8 MPs in 2015! That was a disastrous result for the
Lib Dems. Since then, Lib Dems had been tarnished by Tory association and the
voters kept punishing them for implementing Tory policies in the coalition
government.

When in the EU referendum on 23 May 2016, Britain failed to secure ‘Remain’, the right-wing Tory fanatics as well as xenophobic nationalist bigots were simply ecstatic. Boris Johnson, arch Brexiteer, declared on the morning on 24 May that this was ‘the day of independence’ for Britain.

It is blatantly obvious that the British politics, particularly the national politics, is now truly and utterly broken and dysfunctional. This process of political erosion and corrosion did not start with the present regime, although this regime bears the brunt of total delusion of the Tory extremists. The erosion of morality among the top politicians had been going on for quite a while now – at least from the dying days of Thatcher administration – sex scandals of Cecil Parkinson, perjury of Jeffrey Archer and others are the vivid examples. However, the end of Thatcher regime did not bring to an end of sex scandals; it only metamorphosed into more sophisticated form. The media then coined a new term ‘sleaze’ to cover everything from political to sex to parliamentary expense scandals. Subsequently, the term ‘spin’ came into the media vocabulary to cover misrepresentation of facts, misleading statements, soft lies, innuendos etc.

However, spin gradually became the norm in political circles. It became a sort of sophisticated political public relations tool during Tony Blair’s regime. But then during and after the tumultuous 2016 EU referendum, all forms of political spins and massaging of facts had become rather mundane and more aggressive form of lies, deception, bigotry became the preferred political tools. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, David Davis, IDS and so forth had been at the forefront of such aggressive use of lies. In the EU referendum campaign, they showed in writing in a double decker bus that £350 million per week extra to NHS would be available if Britain leaves the EU, they also claimed that agricultural subsidy, university research grants from the EU, regeneration of depressed areas etc would be available from the savings of British contribution to the EU. They also shouted out loud that 80 million Turks and endless queues of migrant workers from Africa, Asia and Middle East that were lurking outside the British borders must be stopped by leaving the EU. These are all preposterous scare-mongering lies and deception to achieve their aim.

Honesty,
decency, political correctness etc had been thrown out of the window. When the national
and international economic bodies such as the London School of Economics, the Bank
of England, various Think Tanks, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF had all been
saying that leaving the EU would be disastrous for the UK, opportunistic
politicians like Michael Gove, IDS, Priti Patel, John Redwood etc had been
saying that these organisations had been wrong before and they are wrong again!
When car manufacturers like Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Range Rovers were saying
that leaving the EU would harm their business tremendously, Tory politicians
dismissed them all as scare mongering.

Three years down the line, chickens are coming home to roost. Honda factory in Swindon is closing in two years’ time, Toyota is not planning to have new model built in the UK. Multinational companies in the finance sector are transferring their operations from London to various other countries. Workers are being laid off here and there – not in torrents yet, but in dribs and drabs.

The general public are now seeing what they have been sold in the name of ‘take back control’, ‘we hold all the cards’, ‘bring back sovereignty’, ‘the day of independence’, ‘the future is bright’ etc. When they see and hear on TV and radios that the British prime minister had to go to Brussels early in the morning to seek an additional concession from the EU and she had been told at the end of the day to wait in a side room while the leaders of 27 EU Member States would have dinner and discuss the British request for concession, that was not ‘take back control’ or ‘bring back sovereignty’; that was utter ‘submission of sovereignty’. That was because of some delusional Tory imperialist bigots had been hankering after colonial dreams outside the EU!

Smaller parties like the Lib Dems and the Greens had always sought to ‘Remain’ within the EU and in the aftermath of the corrupt EU referendum, they asked for a new referendum to gauge the view of the public based on facts, not Tory fantasies. The de-facto verdict of the people came in the recent local election in England and Northern Ireland on 2nd May. The Tories lost 1330 councillors (nearly 30%) and Labour lost 84 councillors (nearly 5%). (It should be pointed out that normally opposition party gains a lot of seats from the ruling party in mid-term elections). On the other hand, the Lib Dems gained 704 councillors (nearly 110%) and the Greens gained 194 councillors (nearly 270%). Another striking feature was that independent candidates won 661 seats (nearly 130%).

Anti Brexit march in London on 23 March 2019

The conclusions that can be drawn from this seismic shift in politics are twofold. The first one is that people have lost confidence in and patience with the traditional self-serving opportunistic politicians – be it Tory or Labour. The politicians have forfeited all moral authority, as they lied and cheated in the EU referendum to achieve their goal. The trust in politicians in general is in short supply, although there are lots of very good, honest and sincere politicians in British politics. The second lesson is that despite what the crooked politicians claimed to hammer in their partisan view that ‘the people have spoken’ in the referendum, the people have realised now that they had been given a short shrift by the fraudulent politicians.

Now the opportunistic politicians are throwing up a smokescreen to spread their egregious message that people voted against the established two parties because they disliked the failure of the politicians to deliver Brexit in time. It is like a fraudster deliberately misdiagnosed the illness of the patient and gave a wrong medicine and when the patient was nearly dead, told others that enough dose had not been administered.

The sooner the enemies of the people are exposed and thrown out of their self-serving cocoons, the better it is for the country. However, the big question now is, will this change in political landscape be a permanent one or is it going to be just a flash in the pan?

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